The present invention relates to a three-dimensional object recognition system for automatically recognizing the state of an object, and an inventory system using the three-dimensional object recognition system.
With an increase in the amount of information regarding various fields, how to collect information or how to manage and use information has become extremely important. At shipping sites, information is typically handled as follows. Barcodes are attached to products so that product information may be read from the barcodes by a barcode reader, as one of methods for managing information. Alternatively, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are attached to products so that product information may be read wirelessly from the RFID tags. Pieces of information for product shipping and inventory are shared between companies by using these methods. Such a sharing of information may provide shipping, factory and sales sites with various advantages such as laborsaving of product inspection and inventory works.
Under such circumstances, an inventory system has been proposed, which automatically counts the number of products by setting a pressure sensor to a shelf and detecting a load (JP-A-10-17121). In addition, another inventory system has been proposed, which counts the number of products by extracting outlines of the products from images acquired by a camera and comparing the outlines with characteristic data profiles (JP-A-2001-88912).